This weekend, I promised myself that I will deal with the orchids we grow on the terrace.
For a long time I did not give them any treatment, except for regular watering. and since I had a little free time, which I wrote about in this post, why not spend it on something that interests me, calms me down, and is of vital importance to my orchids.
One by one, I brought them to the kitchen table, where I took them out of the plastic pots, washed the plastic pots, and freed the roots of each one from the tree bark and small compost.
A couple of years ago I watched a clip where an orchid grower explained the complete procedure of transplanting.
For that procedure, I lacked the store-bought potting mix, so I collected some bark from the cut branches of trees in the nearby forest, which I will put in the pots.
My partner asked me why tree bark... Because orchids, in their natural habitat, tropical forests, live as parasites, attached to tree bark.
After removing each orchid from the pot, I loosened it so that every vein from the root was visible, I removed the ones that had rotted.
When removing the rotten part of the root vein, do not cut it, but pull it off. In the middle of that rotten root, there is a root, which is worth the plant to stay where it is.
The most complicated part of this procedure is returning the plant to the pot, due to its thin, sensitive roots.
Then I first spread the large pieces of bark, then the smaller ones, and finally poured all the fine compost that filled most of the pot.
After that, watering followed, filling the full pots with standing water and soaking for more than an hour.
And then repeating the process three more times, for all orchids...
After an hour, I took the pots out of the water, spilled the excess, and returned the pots with transplanted and watered orchids to the terrace.
If you look at the first and last picture, there may not be any difference, but the removal of the rotten roots that I removed from each of them will probably favor further development.
If a flower emerges from all this, I will send you a picture so that it is not a wasted effort.
